Simple Microservices environment for Developers by DevOps

One of the challenges developers are face is having a workable environment for Microservices in the simplest form, they can easily bring it up, and test various scenarios, even what they think it is a complex setup.

So, when we say simplest form what does it actually mean?

1. It depends only on docker, docker-compose, and docker-machine
2. One command makes it up.
3. Have concepts of service registration and discovery.
4. Gateway, with load balancing and rich routing rules by path and host header.
5. Can scale services into multiple instances

I think you already got it, the magic needs "doocker-compose" yaml file, and "docker-machine", on my mac machine, I use VMware fusion (can be Virtualbox) and docker machine to build my docker environment, and by using brew docker package I get the client cli that connects to docker machine environment without the overhead of having complete "Docker for Mac" package. It worth mentioning that I use rancher os inside docker machine, here, you can find all the details to run it. once the docker-machine is up, we need to get the machine ip.

$ docker-machine ls
NAME   ACTIVE   DRIVER         STATE     URL                          SWARM   DOCKER        ERRORS

demo   *        vmwarefusion   Running   tcp://192.168.251.128:2376           v18.06.3-ce

let's have a look into docker compose file:

version: '3.4'

services:
  whoami:
    image: emilevauge/whoami
    environment:
     - SERVICE_TAGS=traefik.enable=true,traefik.frontend.entryPoints=http,traefik.frontend.rule=Host:whoami.consul.local 
     - SERVICE_CHECK_HTTP=/
     - SERVICE_CHECK_INTERVAL=5s
     - TZ=Asia/Dubai
    ports:
      - target: 80
        protocol: tcp
        mode: host 
    depends_on: ["consul","registrator","gateway"]
  
  registrator:
    image: gliderlabs/registrator:latest
    network_mode: host
    volumes:
     - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock
    command: -ip=192.168.251.128 -deregister="always" -cleanup=true consul://192.168.251.128:8500
    depends_on: ["consul"]


  consul:
    image: consul:latest
    network_mode: host
    command: agent -server -bind=192.168.251.128 -bootstrap -client=0.0.0.0 -ui
   


  gateway:
    image: traefik:alpine
    ports:
     - "80:80"
     - "8080:8080"
    command: ["--accesslog", "--api", "--consul", "--consul.endpoint=192.168.251.128:8500", "--consulCatalog", "--consulCatalog.endpoint=192.168.251.128:8500", "--consulCatalog.exposedByDefault=false", "--consulCatalog.domain=consul.local"]      

    depends_on: ["consul"]

I use this mechanism inside my CI pipeline for integration testing, you can't imagine what you can achieve using these tools.